bmon vs bwmon

bmon is a free bandwidth monitor and rate estimator for Linux and macOS. It captures networking statistics for monitoring and debugging, presenting them through an interactive curses interface or programmable text output for scripts. The 5.0 release notes describe graph rendering with Braille cells, JSON output, traffic-control ingress and egress display filters, and IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in additional information. Installation guidance covers Fedora and CentOS 7 packages, Debian or Ubuntu and CentOS 6 builds, and macOS installation through Homebrew or source compilation. Release notes also mention CI builds for Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, with fixes for FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, and OpenBSD builds. The repository lists MIT and BSD license files. bmon is maintained by tgraf and hosted on GitHub Pages. Its free plan costs nothing.

bwmon is a free, self-hosted bandwidth monitor for one Linux host and one network interface. Its dashboard updates receive and transmit rates every second, charts recent traffic, and lists top processes. When traffic passes five times its rolling two-minute average, bwmon records process attribution, all-interface rates, and leading conntrack flows for spike investigation. It retains five-minute samples for six months, with views from one hour to all time, a time-of-week heatmap, and a rate histogram. A banner appears when the rolling five-minute average reaches 40 Mbps; cleared alerts remain in the history table. Installation uses a shell script that sets up the collector, systemd service, cron jobs, and nginx server block; the dashboard defaults to port 8080. It requires Linux kernel 4.0 or later and root access. Debian and Ubuntu use the apt-based installer, while other distributions need manual dependency setup. The project recommends authentication for internet-exposed installations.